Deporting Illegals, Fixing Mexico. A friend here in Newark USA sent me an emailed link to an article about a demonstration in favor of illegal immigrants' "rights" that took place here Sunday. I replied:

I have zero sympathy for illegal immigrants. They had no right to come here when and how they did, so have no right to be here now. I am fully in favor of deporting them ALL — no amnesty for anybody but legitimate refugees, such as gay men who flee dangerously intolerant societies. We should annex Mexico, and if Mexicans want open access to our society, they have to yield their sovereignty to the Nation, just as NJ yielded its sovereignty to the newly formed United States and lost the right to control its borders against residents of other states. If Mexicans, Salvadorans, etc., hate their lack of opportunity in their own countries, they have at least two options: (1) agitate for change in their countries as adamantly as they agitate for the 'right' to be in OUR country and (2) apply for legal immigration to the United States. They do not have the right simply to ignore our laws and pretend they have some superior "human right" to march across our borders as tho they weren't there. We don't have the right to work in Mexico or El Salvador. They don't have the right to work here.

To those, including Bush, who say we "can't" move 12 million people across the border, I agree with Jay Leno's observation last nite: "Mexico did it!" So can we.
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Leno also apparently made a different remark about Mexico that a friend in New York sent me as part of a roundup of late-nite TV witticisms:

This is what I don't get about this. They've got oil. Their citizens love the United States. Forget Iraq, we should have invaded Mexico.

Instead, Mexicans invade the United States.
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We don't have to have an "invasion" from either direction. We can simply merge. Erase the border and let the dynamics of economics and political development determine where people live in what is plainly a natural community that we have artificially bisected with an arbitrary line.
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Americans concerned about "energy independence" should be made keenly aware that yes, Mexico does have oil, but it won't develop it fully and won't export more to the United States because of nationalism. So Mexico's ruling class is willfully keeping its people poor to spite the United States.
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Nationalism is a very bad bargain for the bulk of Mexicans, who would do far better to subsume their nationalism into a larger nationalism, that of the United States, the Great American Union that some of the Founding Fathers dreamed of extending to all the Americas, from Point Barrow in the north to Tierra del Fuego in the south.
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Mexican nationalism is bad for us too. If Mexico were part of the United States, a gallon of gas wouldn't cost $3, much less the $4 and even $5 we seem to be facing.
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The misuse of Mexico's oil wealth is just one small part of the problem of unwise and unfair economics in Mexico.
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The United States didn't make Mexico an unholy mess for the great preponderance of its people. That was the doing of Mexico's own ruling class and culture. Mexicans looking around desperately for someone else to blame, suggest that the reason Mexico is poor is because the U.S. "stole" half the country in taking over Texas and the Southwest — that if Mexico had those rich areas today, it too would be rich.
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But look at Brazil, which is twice as big as Mexico would have been had the U.S. not annexed its northern half. Brazil is a mess at least as bad as Mexico, despite being intrinsically rich, just as Mexico is intrinsically rich.
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In the case of both Mexico and Brazil — indeed, the bulk of Latin America — it is not the country's resources but the society's management of those resources and distribution of opportunity that has produced economic disaster for the mass of their people. The cultures are to blame — their own cultures, not ours.
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If Argentina were a state of the United States, it would be rich and happy. Instead, it is perpetually at the edge of bankruptcy. If Mexico were part of the United States, within 50 years the bulk of Mexico would be as prosperous as that huge swath of territory taken from Mexico in the 19th Century, from California to Colorado and Texas.
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If Mexican illegals (who prefer the dishonest term "undocumented", as tho they are entitled to documents but just don't happen to have them on hand) were honest, they would admit aloud that they left Mexico because Mexico is a horrible country that needs to be reformed from top to bottom, and the reason they could not succeed there is that the cards are stacked against them.
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They should be very loud indeed, and tell the Mexican government that they have had to leave their own country because Mexican society is a nitemare of injustice, and if they have to go back, they will raise hell and change everything that forced them out in the first place.
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And then they should do it.
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Go back, raise hell, change Mexico, and you won't have to leave your own country to live in a country where you can rise as high as your talents take you.
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If you don't want to wait as long as it would take to transform Mexico in isolation, demand that Mexico join the Union, which would accelerate the process at least ten times.
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The United States did not make a mess of Mexico and cannot fix it from the outside. Our first responsibility is to our own people. If Mexicans want to be considered "our own people", and bring the resources of the U.S. Government and national economy to the aid of the people of Mexico, there is that quick fix: join the Union.
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Ten Mexican states would make a huge difference in American society, mostly for the good, and accession to the Union would make a huge difference, all to the good, for the people of Mexico. American social conservatives would be bolstered by the conservative cultural values of Mexicans, while American political liberals would be strengthened by an influx of people concerned about economic justice.
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And after annexation, instead of a 1,951-mile southern border,* we'd have a more manageable 753-mile southern border. If we also annexed Belize, which is largely English-speaking, we'd have only a 597-mile southern border. In fact, if we annexed all of Central America as well, we'd have a 140-mile southern border, between us and Colombia. Now that's defensible.
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* I was, again, ticked off, when I went to check the length of borders at the online CIA World Factbook, to find only metric measures, as required me to do a conversion. So ticked off, indeed, was I that I finally went to the website of my Congressman, Donald M. Payne, and sent him this message by feedback form (thus the BLOCK CAPS for emphasis, there being no way to bold or italicize in feedback forms):

Please compel the CIA to revise its World Factbook (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/) to show American measures, not just metric measures. I wanted to check the length of the U.S.-Mexican border but find only this: >>3,141 km<<. How is that useful to Americans, who PAY for the CIA World Factbook? Why is it that the only country that PAYS for the CIA World Factbook is the one country that CAN'T UNDERSTAND the measures it employs? Why does the CIA feel no obligation to put U.S. measures EVEN SECOND, in parentheses? Congress needs to snap the CIA out of its arrogance and force it to publish all its information in U.S. measures, FIRST. If it ALSO wants to put in foreign measures, fine, but SECOND, and in parentheses. I am very tired of foreign-minded elitists in the Federal Government holding the American people in contempt. Congress needs to tell the CIA that it will cut its funding by 1,000 times the cost of the CIA World Factbook if it does not publish that Factbook with American measures.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,390.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:36 AM